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  • Lost Lives, Lost Culture: The Forgotten History of Indigenous Boarding Schools

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    Thousands of Native American children attended U.S. boarding schools designed to “civilize the savage.” Many died. Many who lived are reclaiming their identity.

    Rukmini Callimachi
    July 19, 2021

    DURANGO, Colo. — The last day Dzabahe remembers praying in the way of her ancestors was on the morning in the 1950s when she was taken to the boarding school. At first light, she grabbed a small pouch and ran out into the desert to a spot facing the rising sun to sprinkle the taa dih’deen — or corn pollen — to the four directions, offering honor for the new day.

    Within hours of arriving at the school, she was told not to speak her own Navajo language. The leather skirt her mother had sewn for her and the beaded moccasins were taken away and bundled in plastic, like garbage. She was given a dress to wear and her long hair was cut — something that is taboo in Navajo culture. Before she was sent to the dormitory, one more thing was taken: her name. “You have a belief system. You have a way of life you have already embraced,” said Bessie Smith, now 79, who continues to use the name given to her at the former boarding school in Arizona. “And then it’s so casually taken away,” she said. “It’s like you are violated.”

    The recent discoveries of unmarked graves at government-run schools for Indigenous children in Canada — 215 graves in British Columbia, 750 more in Saskatchewan — surfaced like a long-forgotten nightmare. But for many Indigenous people in Canada and the United States, the nightmare was never forgotten. Instead the discoveries are a reminder of how many living Native Americans were products of an experiment in forcibly removing children from their families and culture. Many of them are still struggling to make sense of who they were and who they are.

    In the century and a half that the U.S. government ran boarding schools for Native Americans, hundreds of thousands of children were housed and educated in a network of institutions, created to “civilize the savage.” By the 1920s, one group estimates, nearly 83 percent of Native American school-age children were attending such schools. “When people do things to you when you’re growing up, it affects you spiritually, physically, mentally and emotionally,” said Russell Box Sr., a member of the Southern Ute tribe who was 6 when he was sent to a boarding school in southwestern Colorado. “We couldn’t speak our language, we couldn’t sing our prayer songs,” he said. “To this day, maybe that’s why I can’t sing.”

    The discovery of the bodies in Canada led Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Native American to head the department that once ran the boarding schools in the United States — and herself the granddaughter of people forced to attend them — to announce that the government would search the grounds of former facilities to identify the remains of children. That many children died in the schools on this side of the border is not in question. Just last week, nine Lakota children who perished at the federal boarding school in Carlisle, Pa., were disinterred and buried in buffalo robes in a ceremony on a tribal reservation in South Dakota.

    Many of the deaths of former students have been recorded in federal archives and newspaper death notices. Based on what those records indicate, the search for bodies of other students is already underway at two former schools in Colorado: Grand Junction Indian School in central Colorado, which closed in 1911, and the Fort Lewis Indian School, which closed in 1910 and reopened in Durango as Fort Lewis College. “There were horrific things that happened at boarding schools,” said Tom Stritikus, the president of Fort Lewis College. “It’s important that we daylight that.”

    The idea of assimilating Native Americans through education dates back to the earliest history of the colonies. In 1775, the Continental Congress passed a bill appropriating $500 for the education of Native American youth. By the late 1800s, the number of students in boarding schools had risen from a handful to 24,000, and the amount appropriated had soared to $2.6 million. Throughout the decades that they were in existence, the schools were seen as both a cheaper and a more expedient way of dealing with the “Indian problem.”

    Carl Schurz, the secretary of the interior in the late 1800s, argued that it cost close to $1 million to kill a Native American in warfare, versus just $1,200 to give his child eight years of schooling, according to the account of the historian David Wallace Adams in “Education for Extinction.” “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one,” Capt. Richard H. Pratt, the founder of one of the first boarding schools, wrote in 1892. “In a sense I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: That all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”

    Those who survived the schools described violence as routine. As punishment, Norman Lopez was made to sit in the corner for hours at the Ute Vocational School in southwestern Colorado where he was sent around age 6. When he tried to get up, a teacher picked him up and slammed him against the wall, he said. Then the teacher picked him up a second time and threw him headfirst to the ground, he said. “I thought that it was part of school,” said Mr. Lopez, now 78. “I didn’t think of it as abusive.”

    A less violent incident marked him more, he said. His grandfather taught him how to carve a flute out of the branch of a cedar. When the boy brought the flute to school, his teacher smashed it and threw it in the trash. He grasped even then how special the cedar flute and his native music were. “That’s what God is. God speaks through air,” he said, of the music his grandfather taught him. He said the lesson was clear, both in the need to comply and the need to resist. “I had to keep quiet. There’s plenty where it came from. Tree’s not going to give up,” he said of the cedar. “I’m not going to give up.” Decades later, Mr. Lopez has returned to the flute. He carves them and records in a homemade studio, set up in his home on the Ute Mountain Ute reservation in Towaoc, Colo.

    In the same boarding school, Mr. Box was punished so severely for speaking Ute that he refused to teach his children the language, in an effort to shield them the pain he endured, his ex-wife, Pearl E. Casias, said. Years of alcoholism followed, he said. His marriage fell apart. It was not until middle age that he reached a fork in the road. “I had been yearning in here,” he said, pointing to his heart. “My spirit had been yearning in here to stand in the lodge,” he said, referring to the medicine lodge that dancers enter during the annual Sundance, one of the most important ceremonies of the Ute people. “Then one day I said to myself, ‘Now I’m going to stand.’ And when I said that inside of me, there was a little flame.” He went to the Sundance for the first time. He stopped drinking. This year, one of his daughters reached out to her mother, asking if she could teach her how to make beaded moccasins.

    But for many, the wounds just do not heal. Jacqueline Frost, 60, was raised by her Ute aunt, a matron at the boarding school who embraced the system and became its enforcer. Ms. Frost said she remembered the beatings. “I don’t know if it was a broom or a mop, I just remember the stick part, and my aunt swung it at me,” she said, adding: “There was belts. There was hangers. There was shoes. There was sticks, branches, wire.” She, too, turned to alcohol. “Even though I’ve gone to so much counseling,” she said, “I still would always say, ‘Why am I like this? Why do I have this ugly feeling inside me?’”

    By the turn of the century, a debate had erupted on whether it was better to “carry civilization to the Indian” by building schools on tribal land. In 1902, the government completed the construction of a boarding school on the Southern Ute reservation in Ignacio, Colo. — the school that Mr. Box and Mr. Lopez both attended. The impact of the school, which was shuttered decades ago, can be summed up in two statistics: In the 1800s, when federal agents were trawling the reservation for children, they complained that there were almost no adults who spoke English. Today, about 30 people out of a tribe of fewer than 1,500 people — only 2 percent — speak the Ute language fluently, said Lindsay J. Box, a tribal spokeswoman. (Mr. Box is her uncle.)

    For decades, Ms. Smith barely spoke Navajo. She thought she had forgotten it, until years later at the hospital in Denver where she worked as director of patient admissions, a Navajo couple came in with their dying baby and the language came tumbling back, she said. It marked a turn for her. She realized that the vocabulary she thought had been beaten out of her was still there. As she looked back, she recognized the small but meaningful ways in which she had resisted. From her first day in the dormitory, she never again practiced the morning prayer to the four directions. Unable to do it in physical form, she learned instead to do it internally: “I did it in my heart,” she said. In her old age, she now makes jewelry using traditional elements, like “ghost beads” made from the dried berries of the juniper tree. When she started selling online, she chose the domain: www.dzabahe.com. It is her birth name, the one that was taken from her at the boarding school, the one whose Navajo meaning endured: “woman who fights back.”[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type="1_3" _builder_version="4.0.11"][et_pb_image src="http://stg-stagings-staging.kinsta.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/merlin_189806475_8c2a4519-8a4e-45e8-9e37-4978b4a6691e-superJumbo.jpg" align="center" admin_label="Image" _builder_version="4.9.9" hover_enabled="0" alt="A memorial set up after the discovery of 215 unmarked graves at a former boarding school in British Columbia.Credit…Amber Bracken for The New York Times" title_text="Makeshift memorial for the discovery of 215 remains of Native children at a boarding school cemetery in British Columbua" sticky_enabled="0"][/et_pb_image][et_pb_text admin_label="Image caption" module_class="img_caption" _builder_version="4.9.9" hover_enabled="0" sticky_enabled="0"]A memorial set up after the discovery of 215 unmarked graves at a former boarding school in British Columbia.
    Credit…Amber Bracken for The New York Times[/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider _builder_version="4.0.11"][/et_pb_divider][et_pb_text admin_label="Date/ Time and other relevant information" _builder_version="4.9.9" hover_enabled="0" sticky_enabled="0"]

    Read the complete New York Times article here.

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  • Remains of Native American children returning to tribal lands from Army cemetery

    [et_pb_section fb_built="1" _builder_version="4.0.11"][et_pb_row column_structure="2_3,1_3" _builder_version="4.0.11"][et_pb_column type="2_3" _builder_version="4.0.11"][et_pb_text admin_label="Main text" _builder_version="4.9.9" hover_enabled="0" sticky_enabled="0"]Mark Scolforo Associated Press
    July 15, 2021

    The disinterred remains of nine Native American children who died more than a century ago while attending a government-run school in Pennsylvania were headed home to Rosebud Sioux tribal lands in South Dakota on Wednesday after a ceremony returning them to relatives. The handoff at a graveyard on the grounds of the U.S. Army's Carlisle Barracks was part of the fourth set of transfers to take place since 2017. The remains of an Alaskan Aleut child were returned to her tribe earlier this summer.

    "We want our children home no matter how long it takes," said U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who in June announced a nationwide investigation into the boarding schools that attempted to assimilate Indigenous children into white society. Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, said at the event that "forced assimilation practices" stripped away the children's clothing, their language and their culture. She said the government aims to locate the schools and burial sites and identify the names and tribal affiliations of children from the boarding schools around the country.

    Nearly a thousand unmarked graves have been discovered in recent months at former residential school sites for Indigenous children in Canada. In Pennsylvania, the nine sets of remains inside small wooden coffins were carried past a phalanx of tribal members and well-wishers before being loaded into a vehicle trailer to be driven to Sioux City, Iowa. The children died between 1880 and 1910. Ione Quigley, the tribe's historic preservation officer, recounted how she attended the disinterment earlier this week and used red ochre to prepare the remains in a traditional way. "We got everything done as respectfully and honorably as possible," Quigley said.

    Russell Eagle Bear, a Rosebud Sioux tribal council representative, said a lodge was being prepared for a Friday ceremony at a Missouri River landing near Sioux City where children boarded a steamboat for the journey to the government-run Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The Carlisle school, founded by an Army officer, took drastic steps to separate Native American students from their culture, including cutting their braids, dressing them in military-style uniforms and punishing them for speaking their native languages. They were forced to adopt European names.

    More than 10,000 Native American children were taught there and endured harsh conditions that sometimes led to death from such diseases as tuberculosis. Eagle Bear said children from the tribe endured ridicule along the trip to Carlisle in 1879, three years after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Tribal officials said that when the remains arrive in South Dakota, some will be buried in a veterans' cemetery and others are destined for family graveyards.

    "We're here today and we are going to take our children home," Eagle Bear said to about 100 attendees on Wednesday. "We have a big homecoming on the other end." Since August 2017, the Army has disinterred 22 remains of Native American children from the cemetery, including the 10 that occurred this year. In previous years, remains were turned over to the Northern Arapaho, Blackfeet, Oglala Sioux, Oneida, Omaha, Modoc and Iowa tribes.[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type="1_3" _builder_version="4.0.11"][et_pb_image src="http://stg-stagings-staging.kinsta.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/4312c2ae-cf30-4f5b-b489-d596d53052ba-AP21195613210399.jpg" align="center" admin_label="Image" _builder_version="4.9.9" hover_enabled="0" alt="Gathering seen from behind of seated people under a tent and looking at a row of flag draped coffins while Russell Eagle Bear speaks" title_text="Remains of Native children returned from Army cemetery" sticky_enabled="0"][/et_pb_image][et_pb_text admin_label="Image caption" module_class="img_caption" _builder_version="4.9.9" hover_enabled="0" sticky_enabled="0"]

    Russell Eagle Bear, a Rosebud Sioux tribal official, left, speaks during a ceremony at the U.S. Army’s Carlisle Barracks, in Carlisle, Pa., Wednesday July 14, 2021. Matt Rourke, AP

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    Read the original article at usatoday.com

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  • A Federal Probe Into Indian Boarding School Gravesites Seeks To Bring Healing

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    NOELLE E. C. EVANS
    July 11, 2021

    The United States is about to undertake a national investigation into hundreds of American Indian boarding schools that from the 1800s through the 20th century served to “kill the Indian to save the man,” according to one school’s founder.

    On June 22, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative in an address to the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) during a virtual conference. It came weeks after the discovery of 215 Indigenous children’s remains were found at a school site in British Columbia.

    “To address the intergenerational impact of Indian boarding schools and to promote spiritual and emotional healing in our communities, we must shed light on the unspoken traumas of the past,” Haaland said in her announcement. “No matter how hard it will be.”

    The Department of the Interior oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs which, along with denominations of the Christian church, was responsible for boarding school practices starting with the Indian Civilization Act of 1819 until the late 1970s and after. Now the DOI will now oversee an investigation into more than 365 boarding school sites in the U.S. From 1869 when the Peace Policy was enacted through 1978, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition estimates that hundreds of thousands of Native children were removed from their families and sent to these schools, which spanned 30 states, the majority in Oklahoma (83), Arizona (51), Alaska (33), and New Mexico (26).

    By 1926, nearly 83% of Indian school-age children were attending boarding schools, according to the organization.

    What the investigation will entail

    On its own, the federal initiative doesn’t address the full spectrum of injustice inflicted by the government on Indigenous people, but Indigenous leaders say it’s a start. “We don’t know where this is going to lead, but we do know that it is going to lead us down a path of truth, and a path of justice, and a path of righteousness,” said Fawn Sharp, NCAI president. The initiative will identify school sites where there may have been student burials, as well as the tribal affiliations of the children; search through DOI records of boarding school oversight dating back to 1819; consult with Tribal Nations, Alaska Native corporations, and Native Hawaiian organizations; and result in a final report to Haaland by April 1, 2022.

    “The legacy of Indian boarding schools remains, manifesting itself in Indigenous communities through intergenerational trauma.” Haaland wrote in a secretarial memo dated June 22. To date, more than 1,000 remains of mostly Indigenous children have been found at four American Indian boarding school sites in Canada, since May, schools where Native students were forced to assimilate to “white” culture. That’s almost a third of an estimated 3,213 student death toll documented in one of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final reports in 2015. It is, however, also just 2.5% of the more than 150 school sites in Canada. “The fallout of what we are witnessing is not only of the skyrocketing numbers as the body count climbs,” Sharp said. “But the realization that there’s a direct connection between that and every element of suffering and oppression that we’ve felt (for generations).

    “Nobody escapes from the historical trauma of the boarding schools”

    Many boarding school students never returned to their families; some were placed in foster care while others went missing. For generations, the descendants of students who survived have been living with a legacy trauma. “Nobody escapes from the historical trauma of the boarding schools,” said Agnes Williams, an elder with the Seneca Nation of Indians who served as an International Indian Treaty Council delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission in 1983. “The substance abuse and addiction is, is, is what is part of that right now.”

    A former social worker, Williams was the executive director of a child welfare agency, the Urban Indian Child Resource Center, in the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid 1970s. There she recruited Native foster parents. “When people were brought up in the boarding school, nobody taught them how to parent,” she said. “So then the next generation of unparented Indians becomes foster care and adoption, which is the next travesty.” Then in 1978, compulsory attendance for Indigenous children at boarding schools, which was established in 1891, was abolished with the Indian Child Welfare Act, but Native family separations did not end there.

    Very little work was done to help families rehabilitate

    “As the boarding school era began to wane and change, it then turned really into a different kind of system, but one that still removed children, often for unnecessary reasons, and that was through state and private child welfare agencies.” said David Simmons, director of government affairs and advocacy for the National Indian Child Welfare Association (NICWA). “There was very little work done to try and see if there was anything they could do to help the families rehabilitate, very little work done to really understand if there were any other family members who might be able to step in,” he said. “And usually the reasons that were given for removing children were pretty flimsy, compared to what we normally consider good practice in child safety.” In 2012, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission between the state of Maine and the Wabanaki Confederacy found that Native children in the state were five times more likely to be placed in foster care than non-Natives — decades after the boarding school era.

    In one documented case, a Wabanaki woman recalled one way her trauma was passed down to her children. She was fostered in a non-Native home in the early 1960s where she was punished by being placed up to her neck in a tub of cold water. That experience stayed with her. “If anybody was to walk by me with water on their hands and go like that (hand flicking motion), just joking around, I get very angry, very quickly,” she said in her report. “And, my kids found that out very young, you know, and I didn’t mean to do that to them, it’s just that it was a reaction to this fear.” Extensive fostering of Native children is a similar trend around the country. For example, in 2019 the Pew Research Center found that 70% of Cherokee children in the Midwest had been placed in non-Native foster homes, a practice that can lead to a loss of identity.

    Of 1,700 foster cases, 40% were due to parental opioid abuse. “When you look at the current state of Indian country, and the conditions of our citizens and our people with the highest metrics of suicide, the highest metrics of alcohol and drug abuse: that is an entire ethnic population self-medicating for centuries of pain,” NCAI president Sharp said. However, the brain can heal from emotional trauma. Just as the brain adapts to negative experiences, that same neuroplasticity can be tapped with certain therapies, and art. “If you have services, the brain is amazing, it can heal from an awful lot of things. You can develop coping skills and you can become a relatively well-functioning person even after trauma,” Simmons said. “But if you don’t have access to those services, it’s just the same thing day in and day out and it can even get worse over time.”

    Federal initiative is a moment of reckoning for everyone

    A 2018 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights titled, “Broken Promises,” found that U.S. Federal programs meant to serve Native Americans’ social and economic wellbeing are chronically underfunded. In 2016, Native Americans received 28% of healthcare funding per person compared with Federal healthcare spending nationwide. “Not only are we living with the impacts of ethnic cleansing and genocide, but we are without resources to even begin to confront in do the healing,” said NCAI president Sharp. With the announcement of the Federal initiative, Sharp said it marks a moment of reckoning, one she hopes will last for several generations and not just within Native communities.

    “Nobody inside and outside of Indian country that’s a citizen of the United States is immune from this history. It’s our shared history,” Sharp said. “So for that reason, it is urgent that we not let another generation pass where this tragedy is ignored.” While Sharp hopes the DOI’s initiative’s final report may establish a foundation of historical evidence, without resources to address the profound impacts of forced relocations and boarding schools on Native people, paths toward long-term healing could be compromised.

    [/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type="1_3" _builder_version="4.0.11"][et_pb_image src="http://stg-stagings-staging.kinsta.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/deb-haaland-secretary-of-the-interior.jpg" alt="Deb Haaland Secretary of the Interior of the USA, a middle aged American Indian woman with long black hair wearing silver beads and a professional black jacket with red shirt standing in a natural setting" title_text="deb-haaland-secretary-of-the-interior" align="center" admin_label="Image" _builder_version="4.9.6"][/et_pb_image][et_pb_text admin_label="Image caption" module_class="img_caption" _builder_version="4.9.6"]Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo)[/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider _builder_version="4.0.11"][/et_pb_divider][et_pb_text admin_label="Date/ Time and other relevant information" _builder_version="4.9.6"]Read the original article at NPR.org.[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]

  • Secretary Haaland Announces Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative

    [et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”4.0.11″][et_pb_row column_structure=”2_3,1_3″ _builder_version=”4.0.11″][et_pb_column type=”2_3″ _builder_version=”4.0.11″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Main text” _builder_version=”4.9.6″]June 22, 2021
    Outlines Path Forward on Troubled Legacy of Federal Boarding School Policies in Remarks to National Congress of American Indians

    WASHINGTON — In remarks to the National Congress of American Indians 2021 Mid Year Conference today, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced a Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, a comprehensive review of the troubled legacy of federal boarding school policies.

    Today’s announcement is accompanied by a secretarial memo in which Secretary Haaland directs the Department to prepare a report detailing available historical records, with an emphasis on cemeteries or potential burial sites, relating to the federal boarding school program in preparation for a future site work. This work will occur under the supervision of the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs.

    “The Interior Department will address the inter-generational impact of Indian boarding schools to shed light on the unspoken traumas of the past, no matter how hard it will be,” said Secretary Haaland. “I know that this process will be long and difficult. I know that this process will be painful. It won’t undo the heartbreak and loss we feel. But only by acknowledging the past can we work toward a future that we’re all proud to embrace.”

    Secretary Haaland recently reflected on the inter-generational trauma created by these policies in an op-ed.

    “We must shed light on what happened at federal Boarding Schools,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, who also delivered remarks outlining implementation of this effort. “As we move forward in this work, we will engage in Tribal consultation on how best to use this information, protect burial sites, and respect families and communities.”

    Beginning with the Indian Civilization Act of 1819, the United States enacted laws and implemented policies establishing and supporting Indian boarding schools across the nation. The purpose of Indian boarding schools was to culturally assimilate Indigenous children by forcibly relocating them from their families and communities to distant residential facilities where their American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian identities, languages, and beliefs were to be forcibly suppressed. For over 150 years, hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children were taken from their communities.

    The Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative will serve as an investigation about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences of residential Indian boarding schools. The primary goal will be to identify boarding school facilities and sites; the location of known and possible student burial sites located at or near school facilities; and the identities and Tribal affiliations of children interred at such locations.

    The recent discovery of 215 unmarked graves by Canada’s Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc First Nation at the Kamloops Indian Residential School prompted the Department to undertake this new initiative with the goal of shedding light on these past traumas.

    The work will proceed in several phases and include the identification and collection of records and information related to the Department of Interior’s own oversight and implementation of the Indian boarding school program; formal consultations with Tribal Nations, Alaska Native corporations, and Native Hawaiian organizations to clarify the processes and procedures for protecting identified burial sites and associated information; and the submission of a final written report on the investigation to the Secretary by April 1, 2022.

    The Interior Department continues to operate residential boarding schools through the Bureau of Indian Education. In sharp contrast to the policies of the past, these schools aim to provide a quality education to students from across Indian Country and to empower Indigenous youth to better themselves and their communities as they seek to practice their spirituality, learn their language, and carry their culture forward.[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type="1_3" _builder_version="4.0.11"][et_pb_image src="http://stg-stagings-staging.kinsta.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/DOI_LOGO_400x400.jpg" alt="US Dept of Interior seal showing a buffalo standing on open grassland and earth in front of blue silhouetted mountains with the sun rising in the background. The words US Department of Interior, March 3, 1849 ring the image." title_text="US Dept of Interior Seal" align="center" admin_label="Image" _builder_version="4.9.6"][/et_pb_image][et_pb_text admin_label="Image caption" module_class="img_caption" _builder_version="4.9.6"]U.S. Department of Interior seal[/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider _builder_version="4.0.11"][/et_pb_divider][et_pb_text admin_label="Date/ Time and other relevant information" _builder_version="4.9.6"]Read the original press release on the US Department of the Interior website.[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]

  • Federal Bill Addresses Cultural Genocide Caused by Indian Boarding Schools

    [et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”4.0.11″][et_pb_row column_structure=”2_3,1_3″ _builder_version=”4.0.11″][et_pb_column type=”2_3″ _builder_version=”4.0.11″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Main text” _builder_version=”4.6.5″ hover_enabled=”0″ sticky_enabled=”0″]Evie Blad
    October 1, 2020

    For about 100 years, the U.S. government supported a system of boarding schools where more than 100,000 American Indian and Alaska Native children were stripped of their culture, their languages, and their religions and forced to assimilate to white customs.

    That policy, which continued until the 1960s, has continued affects on native communities today, says a bill filed this week by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M.

    The United States has never fully accounted for the harms caused by the schools, the lawmakers said. Their bill, which has attracted a bipartisan list of cosponsors, would form a “Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policy” to compile records and oral accounts of what happened in at 367 Indian boarding schools across 30 states. Those schools educated children as young as five years old and sometimes forced them into labor in white communities far from their homes, advocacy groups say, but many records of their practices have been lost or destroyed.

    The legislation uses some blunt language to make the case for a deep examination of the schools’ history.

    “The Indian Boarding School Policy was adopted by the United States Government to strip American Indian and Alaska Native children of their indigenous identities, beliefs, and traditional languages to assimilate them into White American culture through federally funded Christian-run schools, which had the effect of cultural genocide,” the bill says.

    An early model for those off-site boarding schools was the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Penn., where founder Gen. Richard Pratt operated under the motto “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Education Week included the Carlisle school in a previous series on Indian education. A timeline shows an archival photo of long-haired students when they first arrived at the school wearing clothing from home. In the next photo, taken four months later, they have short-cropped hair and military-style clothing.

    “I know not many people are aware of the history of Indian boarding schools, and I know it’s not taught in schools—but our country must do better to acknowledge our real history and push for truth and reconciliation,” Haaland, one of the first Native American women elected to Congress, said in a statement. “The commission that U.S. Senator Warren and my colleagues want to create will be the first step to the healing that Native communities desperately need.”

    Warren, who has previously teamed up with Haaland on bills that address native issues, called the boarding school policy “a stain on America’s history.”

    Today, Native American students still lag behind their white peers in academic outcomes, and their stories are frequently overlooked in U.S. history texts. At public schools that work with large populations of Native American students, educators say policies of the past have led to generations of distrust of the government and the education system. In Oregon, for example, a group of districts sought to tackle chronic absenteeism among native students by rebuilding connections with their communities and by incorporating native language and symbols into their classrooms.

    A 2018 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights documented some of those ongoing harms, calling boarding schools a “crucial precursor to many of the existing problems for some Native Americans.”

    The commission formed by that bill would also develop recommendations for the U.S. government to “acknowledge and heal” the trauma caused by its support of the schools and to stop “modern-day assimilation practices carried out by State social service departments, foster care agencies, and adoption services.”

    In 2014, a similar commission in Canada determined that more than 4,000 Indigenous students died while attending government-funded boarding schools there.

    The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, a non-profit organization formed to address the legacy of Indian boarding schools in the United States, called a commission “long overdue.

    “There can be no change for the future without acknowledgement of the past and there can be no racial equity for all if the conversation doesn’t start with the first nations of these lands,” said a statement from Christine Diindiisi McCleave, the organization’s CEO and a citizen of Turtle Mountain Ojibwe Nation.

    Read the original article on the Education Week Blog.[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type="1_3" _builder_version="4.0.11"][et_pb_image src="http://stg-stagings-staging.kinsta.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/0.-RC12572.1.1.8_web.jpg" align="center" admin_label="Image" _builder_version="4.6.5" hover_enabled="0" alt="Black and white photo of school children in uniforms, black dresses on the girls and military style jackets and pants on the boys" title_text="Carlisle Indian School student body, March 1892. J.N. Choate, photographer. Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. RC125(7)2.1.1.8" sticky_enabled="0"][/et_pb_image][et_pb_text admin_label="Image caption" module_class="img_caption" _builder_version="4.6.5" hover_enabled="0" sticky_enabled="0"]The student body of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a model for other boarding schools, taken around 1885. -Carlisle Indian School Project at Dickinson College[/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider _builder_version="4.0.11"][/et_pb_divider][et_pb_text admin_label="Date/ Time and other relevant information" _builder_version="4.6.5" hover_enabled="0" sticky_enabled="0"]

    Read the original article on the Education Week blog

    [/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]

  • Bureau of Indian Education: BIE pushes for in-person classes

    [et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”4.0.11″][et_pb_row column_structure=”2_3,1_3″ _builder_version=”4.0.11″][et_pb_column type=”2_3″ _builder_version=”4.0.11″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Main text” _builder_version=”4.4.7″]School opening during pandemic considered a confusing, potentially deadly challenge for reservation residents.

    Mary Annette Pember, Indian Country Today
    August 18, 2020 11:56 a.m.

    WASHINGTON — Tara Sweeney, assistant secretary – Indian Affairs for the U.S. Department of the Interior, sent a letter to tribal leaders this month indicating Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) operated schools will open Sept. 16 for in-person instruction.

    “To the maximum extent possible, BIE (operated) schools will operate brick and mortar schools,” Sweeney wrote.

    According to its website, the BIE oversees a total of 187 schools. Of those, 132 are tribally controlled, operating under the direction of individual tribes. Fifty-five are operated by the bureau. Although bureau leaders maintain they actively include input from tribal consultation and stakeholder meetings and surveys in crafting policies for both tribally controlled and bureau-operated schools, many tribal leaders disagree.

    “These “Dear tribal leader” letters sent out by the BIE don’t acknowledge the authority of tribal nations and our elected officials,” said Daniel Tso, Navajo Nation council delegate and chairman of Navajo Nation Health, Education and Human Services Committee.

    Neither the BIE nor the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) responded to emails from Indian Country Today seeking comment about schools reopening.

    “The guidance in this letter specifically pertains to bureau-operated schools,” Sweeney wrote. “However, BIE recommends tribally controlled schools take the recommendation included as guidance to inform their general operations and to prepare each learning environment for the 2020-2021 school year.”

    Nearly half of the Navajo Nation’s 65 BIE schools are operated directly by the bureau. Only about a third of all BIE-funded schools are operated by the agency. Most are tribally-controlled schools.

    During a meeting Aug. 12, committee members created a resolution recommending all reservation schools provide virtual or online learning options.

    “I realize that Mr. Dearman has to toe the line according to the orders of the Trump administration, but the BIE people in Washington, D.C., don’t know the lay of the land out here,” Tso said.

    Director of the BIE Tony Dearman of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma referred recent questions about school openings to the BIA office of public affairs. That office has not responded to emails from Indian Country Today.

    National push for in-person school

    President Donald Trump is also pushing for public schools to open with in-person instruction.

    However, parents on the Navajo reservation are overwhelmingly opposed to sending their children back to in-person school instruction, according to Tso.

    “Our dear children need to be protected; on a per-capita basis, we are still experiencing high rates of COVID-19 infections and deaths (on the Navajo reservation),” Tso said.

    The Navajo Nation has been one of the worst hotspots during the pandemic.

    The reservation continues to operate under a declared state of emergency and has enacted numerous weekend lockdowns to curb travel on and off the reservation. Navajo Nation government offices remain closed, offering minimal services.

    Overall, according to the Centers for Disease Control, Native Americans have the highest hospitalization rates for COVID-19 of any ethnicity.

    KTUU of Anchorage reports that one in 1,600 Indigenous people are impacted by COVID-19, compared with about one in 3,200 for non-Natives. Native people also have higher rates of chronic conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure, making them especially vulnerable to the disease.

    Many Native people depend on the Indian Health Service, a chronically underfunded federal agency, for their health care needs.

    “Our IHS clinics couldn’t handle an outbreak on the reservation. COVID-19 could potentially wipe out half of our nation here on Pine Ridge,” said Dayna Brave Eagle, tribal education agency director for the Oglala Sioux Tribe in South Dakota.

    The Oglala Sioux Tribe is still operating under a tribal shelter at home ordinance enacted in March prohibiting gatherings of more than 10 people and closing its borders to nonresidents and nonessential travel except for state highway entrances for pass-through vehicles.

    “I don’t know of anybody who wants to send their kid to in-person school,” said Davidica Littlespottedhorse, who lives on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

    Several Native leaders have expressed concern the BIE may force its other bureau-controlled schools to offer in-person instruction regardless of individual tribes’ wishes.

    “Yes, it’s totally possible that since the bureau-operated schools are federal, they will offer in-person instruction (regardless of tribal law),” said Carl Slater, Navajo Nation council delegate and a member of the Health, Education and Human Services Committee.

    According to both Oglala Sioux and Navajo Nation leaders, communication from the BIE has always been a problem.

    As reported by Rebecca Klein and Neal Morton for the Hechinger Report, the bureau was slow to offer advice and close its schools in March, at the beginning of the pandemic.

    According to Tso, the bureau’s Rocky Ridge boarding school on the Navajo reservation didn’t receive the agency-wide March notification to close for several days.

    “Somehow they never got the message and remained open for several days. One of their staff died from COVID-19,” Tso said.

    Internet access for remote learning

    Although more students have received devices such as mobile phones, tablets and computers, limited internet access continues to be a problem.

    “Many of our families live on a fixed income and can’t afford internet access fees,” Brave Eagle said.

    Both the Navajo Nation and the Oglala Sioux Tribe are using their CAREs Act funds to expand internet access to families, but leaders worry funding is inadequate.

    Members of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs expressed concerns and asked for details regarding BIE’s distribution of CAREs Act funding to tribes during an oversight hearing in July.

    “Several of our parents support using jump drives that can be exchanged weekly with the schools, but the BIE schools have not been receptive to these kinds of suggestions,” Tso said.

    But schooling during a pandemic is a challenge for all schools serving reservation youth. According to the National Congress of American Indians, only about 8 percent of Native students attend BIE schools; the remainder attend tribal, public or private schools both on and off the reservation.

    “We’ve heard of some students transferring to schools off the reservation in order to access athletic programs,” Merdanian said.

    Read the full article on the Navajo/Hopi Observer website.[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type="1_3" _builder_version="4.0.11"][et_pb_image src="http://stg-stagings-staging.kinsta.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/ICT_schools_t670.jpg" align="center" admin_label="Image" _builder_version="4.4.7" hover_enabled="0" alt="cars lined up on a desert road with Monument Valley in the background while medical personal stand at each driver window" title_text="Cars lined up for COVID testing near Monument Valley"][/et_pb_image][et_pb_text admin_label="Image caption" module_class="img_caption" _builder_version="4.4.7"]Korene Atene, a certified nursing assistant with the Monument Valley Health Center, gets information from people lined up to get tested for COVID-19 outside the center in Oljato-Monument Valley, San Juan County April 16. (Photo by Kristin Murphy, Deseret News via AP, File)[/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider _builder_version="4.0.11"][/et_pb_divider][et_pb_text admin_label="Date/ Time and other relevant information" _builder_version="4.4.7"]Read the original article on the Navajo/Hopi Observer website.[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]

  • Boarding School exhibition wins AASLH Award of Excellence

    [et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”4.0.11″][et_pb_row column_structure=”2_3,1_3″ _builder_version=”4.0.11″][et_pb_column type=”2_3″ _builder_version=”4.0.11″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Main text” _builder_version=”4.4.7″ hover_enabled=”0″]The American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) announced the Heard Museum is a 2020 recipient of an Award of Excellence for its exhibition Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories. The AASLH Leadership in History Awards Program, now in its 75th year, is the most prestigious recognition for achievement in the preservation and interpretation of state and local history.

    AASLH conferred 57 national awards in 2020 honoring people, projects, exhibitions, and publications. The winners represent the best in the field and provide leadership for the future of state and local history.

    The AASLH Leadership in History Awards Program was initiated in 1945 to establish and encourage standards of excellence in the collection, preservation, and interpretation of state and local history throughout the United States. The awards not only honor significant achievement in the field of state and local history, but also bring public recognition to the superior and innovative accomplishments of small and large organizations, institutions, and programs in this arena.

    Read more about the AASLH and the awards at their website.[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type="1_3" _builder_version="4.0.11"][et_pb_image src="http://stg-stagings-staging.kinsta.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/RC12571.3.27_web.jpg" align="center" admin_label="Image" _builder_version="4.4.7" hover_enabled="0" alt="Late 19thC/early 20thC painting showing a young Native child in breechlout and leather clothing in a distraught state with his arm over his eyes being comforted by another boy in a European style military uniform who stands over him with his hand on the other's shoulder." title_text="Angel DeCora, Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), 1871-1919, Untitled, 1900 Oil on canvas. Courtesy of J. Andrew Darling
    This painting was made as the frontispiece for Francis La Flesche’s book The Middle Five, published in 1900, about young Omaha boys going to a mission school in northeast Nebraska.”][/et_pb_image][et_pb_text admin_label=”Image caption” module_class=”img_caption” _builder_version=”4.4.7″ hover_enabled=”0″]Angel DeCora, Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), 1871-1919, Untitled, 1900 Oil on canvas. Courtesy of J. Andrew Darling
    This painting was made as the frontispiece for Francis La Flesche’s book The Middle Five, published in 1900, about young Omaha boys going to a mission school in northeast Nebraska.[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]

  • Paiute classes at the University of Nevada, Reno and Stewart Indian School

    [et_pb_section fb_built=”1″ _builder_version=”4.0.11″][et_pb_row _builder_version=”4.0.11″][et_pb_column type=”4_4″ _builder_version=”4.0.11″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Main text” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ hover_enabled=”0″]February 18, 2020
    By: Ignacio Montoya
    Assistant Professor, Department of English | University of Nevada, Reno

    As a linguist who works on Native American languages, I was certainly excited to learn that Feb. 21 is International Mother Language Day. Recognizing the strong link between language and culture and cognizant of the alarming rate at which languages are disappearing, the United Nations established this day a couple of decades ago as a way of celebrating and safeguarding the richness of linguistic expression that exists in the world. Of the approximately 6,000 languages spoken today, at least 43 percent of them are estimated to be at risk of not having any native speakers left.1 Native American languages – of which there were around 300 spoken at the time of the arrival of Europeans2 – are among the languages threatened in this way. This includes the languages indigenous to Nevada: Northern Paiute (Numu), Washo (Wašiw), Western Shoshone (Newe) and Southern Paiute (Nuwu/Nuwavi).

    One way that communities have begun to counter these alarming trends is by promoting their languages through education. The local Indigenous communities have been offering classes in their languages for quite a while, and I am happy to report that now the University of Nevada, Reno is also contributing to those efforts by offering classes in the Northern Paiute language, an effort spearheaded by Christina Thomas (tribal community member and now graduate of the University), Jenanne Ferguson (faculty member in anthropology), and me (faculty member in English). For the first time ever, students were able to enroll last semester in PAIT 111: First Year Northern Paiute and this semester in PAIT 112 as a way of partially fulfilling their foreign language requirement.

    The University Paiute classes are taught by Ralph Burns, a respected and celebrated storyteller and teacher from the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe. In keeping with a philosophy that recognizes the vital connections among language, culture and land, students in the class (who include undergraduates, graduate students, alumni and faculty, as well as members of local Indigenous communities) learn not only the vocabulary and grammar of the language but also the ways in which the language reflects the traditional culture, knowledge and life ways of the Numu people. Mr. Burns’ skills as a teacher and his respect and appreciation for anyone interested in learning the language helps to create a classroom atmosphere that is warm, welcoming and supportive. As a student of Mr. Burns’ and a facilitator for the University’s Paiute classes, I can personally attest to how fun and rewarding it is to study the language with him.

    Endeavors such as the language classes offered in tribal communities and at the University demonstrate the power that education has to strengthen the position of threatened languages. It is important to note, though, that education also has the power to seriously imperil those languages. In fact, the educational system is in significant part to blame for the dramatic decline in speakers of Native American languages, here in Nevada and throughout the country.

    Starting in the late 1800s, the government began establishing boarding schools for Native Americans. The first such school was the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which opened in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1879. In the words of its founder, the goal of the school was to take a Native child and “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”3 This institution and others that followed in its image developed practices such as stripping Native children of markers of identity, including clothing, hairstyle and names – all with the aim of eliminating Native American traditions, cultures and ways of life. Native American languages were also a target at these schools and children were punished for speaking them.4

    The boarding school established in our area following this model was the Stewart Indian School, which opened in 1890 just southeast of Carson City. The primary targets for the school were children from tribes in our region (the Northern Paiute, Washoe and Western Shoshone tribes), though the school eventually expanded to include students from various other tribal communities as well. As with other Native American boarding schools, the Stewart Indian School offered Native children vocational training while at the same time implementing practices that suppressed their traditional values and customs. After 90 years in operation, the school closed in 1980. Many former students (including Mr. Burns) continue to live in our community, and many of the buildings of the former school are still in use. One of those buildings houses the just recently opened Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum, where visitors can learn more about the complicated history of the institution.5

    As a result of these boarding schools and other cultural, political and economic efforts at eliminating Native American culture, we have seen a dramatic decline in the number of speakers of Native American languages. Few Native children today have the opportunity to learn their heritage language at home. As the United Nations recognized in its establishment of International Mother Language Day, when languages are lost, ‘opportunities, traditions, memory, unique modes of thinking and expression — valuable resources for ensuring a better future — are also lost.’ Humanity as a whole stands to benefit from the cultural richness that comes with linguistic diversity.

    We can help reverse the trend of language endangerment in numerous ways. The effectiveness of boarding schools at reducing the number of speakers of Native American languages speaks to the power of education at shaping language knowledge and use. It is for this reason that endeavors such as the Paiute classes at the University are so important: They harness the power of education in order to begin to heal some of the devastating harm that educational policies and practices have inflicted on Native Americans. In the process, the classes help to recognize, celebrate and strengthen the rich linguistic legacy of our region.

    Ignacio Montoya is an Assistant Professor in the English Department. He earned his PhD in Linguistics from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. His linguistic specialization is morphology (the structure of words), and his current research interests include language revitalization and reclamation and Indigenous languages of North America.

    1. International Mother Language Day: 21 February

    2. Mithun, Marianne. 2001. The languages of native North America. Cambridge University Press.

    3. Pratt, Richard Henry. 1973. Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction (1892), 46–59. Reprinted in Richard H. Pratt, “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian” 1880–1900, 260–271. Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1892)

    4. Adams, David Wallace.1995. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1926. University Press of Kansas.

    5. Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum[/et_pb_text][et_pb_text admin_label=”Image caption” module_class=”img_caption” _builder_version=”4.3.4″ hover_enabled=”0″]Aerial view of the University of Nevada, Reno campus (photo unr.edu)[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][/et_pb_section]

  • Matthew Sakiestewa Lecture at the Heard Museum

    [et_pb_section fb_built="1" _builder_version="4.0.11"][et_pb_row column_structure="2_3,1_3" _builder_version="4.0.11"][et_pb_column type="2_3" _builder_version="4.0.11"][et_pb_text admin_label="Main text" _builder_version="4.0.11"]Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert (Hopi) will present "Marathoner Louis Tewanima and the Continuity of Hopi Running" at the Heard Museum February 22, 2020 from 1 to 2 p.m. in the Monte Vista Room. Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert is Professor and Head of the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona. He is an enrolled member of the Hopi Tribe from the village of Upper Munqapi. Centering his research and teaching on Native American history and the history of the American West, he examines the history of American Indian education, the Indian boarding school experience, and American Indians and sport.

    In January 1907, Louis Tewanima, from the Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona, enrolled at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. While at Carlisle, Tewanima joined the school’s cross-country team. He won numerous races and earned the opportunity to compete in the 1908 and 1912Summer Olympic Games. Tewanima’s story represents his ability to redefine Hopi running in the twentieth century and shows how he maneuvered within American and European perceptions of Natives and sports. His participation in running events recalls a time when white Americans situated indigenous people at Indian boarding schools on the fringes of U.S. society but embraced them when they brought honors to the country by representing the nation in athletic competitions at home and abroad. Furthermore, Tewanima’s involvement in marathons and Olympic races demonstrates the ways Americans used his success to further the ideals of U.S. nationalism, as he simultaneously continued the long tradition of running among his people.[/et_pb_text][/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type="1_3" _builder_version="4.0.11"][et_pb_image src="http://stg-stagings-staging.kinsta.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/MatthewGilbert_web.jpg" align="center" admin_label="Image" _builder_version="4.0.11"][/et_pb_image][et_pb_text admin_label="Image caption" module_class="img_caption" _builder_version="4.0.11"]Matthew Sakiestewa[/et_pb_text][et_pb_divider _builder_version="4.0.11"][/et_pb_divider][et_pb_text admin_label="Date/ Time and other relevant information" _builder_version="4.0.11"]

    Event Details
    Saturday, February 22
    1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

    Cost: Free

    Location:
    Monte Vista Room

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